Lieutenant-Colonel E. Remington-Hobbs
9th Battalion, Cameronians (Scottish Rifles)

The Colonel as he liked to be known, was Colonel Edward Remington-Hobbs, DSO, and he was the company chairman. He was a fascinating character, a real ladies’ man and, unfortunately, a chain smoker. He had the rare distinction of being the sole survivor of an aeroplane crash …

(Tony Shelton, Diary of a North London Lad, 2011, 117)

Born on 7 February 1916 in Cranbrook, Kent, Edward Remington-Hobbs was commissioned with the Royal Scots Fusiliers after graduating from the Royal Military College, Sandhurst in 1936. He transferred to a Territorial Army battalion of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders after the outbreak of war in 1939. He attended Staff College, Camberley in 1941 and subsequently became an instructor.

In January 1945, he was assigned to the 9th Battalion, Cameronians (Scottish Rifles), succeeding Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Edward Bradford who had been recently wounded. He led the unit throughout the final phase of the North West Europe until May 1945, when he was posted to India. For his personal courage and leadership as an inspiration to all ranks, he earned the D.S.O.

In the Far East, he worked on the repatriation of Allied POWs and the internment and return of captured Japanese troops. He retired from the army in 1953. On 12 April of that year, he was sole survivor of a Caribbean International Airways plane crash near Kingston, Jamaica. The accident killed twelve including his wife.

He remarried in 1957, which was dissolved in 1967, and then married Susan Russell, daughter of Olive, Lady Baillie and former wife of Geoffrey Russell, 4th Baron Ampthill. For his part, Russell held a dim view of his former wife’s new husband:

Suzy remarried as soon as I did … Almost anybody would do, and she chose Colonel Remington Hobbs, who would not do, but she married him nonetheless. He died ahead of her. He was so mean. Sometimes I had to visit them, for the children. I used to bring a case of wine, half red, half white — nothing grand, but goodish. He used to keep my bottles and decant the house plonk into them. He was that sort of man.

(Bevis Hillier, The Virgin’s Baby, 201)

In a similar vein, the writer Hugo Vickers, expressed an opinion: “Colonel Remington Hobbs was always trying to marry rich women, and I rather think he succeeded on more than one occasion. You know the type—charming, pointless, amiable, harmless unless it is your wife they are after” (Hillier, 276).

Remington Hobbs died on 29 July 1997 in Leeds, Kent.